The one song Elton John said could never be a hit again
The kind of music world that Elton John was born into is virtually nothing like what exists now.
As much as the piano-playing icon has been known these days as one of the most decorated rock and roll stars of his time, there’s no telling whether he would have succeeded today had he been competing with the pop stars that flood the charts now. Then again, John knew that he didn’t need to bother competing with everyone else so long as he had the right song to work with whenever Bernie Taupin handed over his lyrics.
Because when looking at their track record together, there aren’t many times when they overtly struck out or anything. They had peaks and valleys throughout their career, but whenever John had an outright trainwreck on his hands like Victim of Love, a lot of it came from the fact that Taupin’s lyrics were taking a back seat or weren’t there at all whenever he sat down to start writing.
That’s not to say that they couldn’t work well with other people. John’s late-career moments working with Leon Russell were immaculately recorded, and when Taupin sat down to collaborate with Alice Cooper, he gave the shock rocker one of the more interesting records he had made after coming out of a mental institution. If you were to break down their all-time classics, though, it would be hard to choose a definitive peak half the time.
Like so many legends before them, John and Taupin had a period of records where almost any of them could rightfully be considered among the best. Everyone from Stevie Wonder to Pink Floyd to The Rolling Stones had that same kind of run, but for John, everything centred around when they worked on Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy.
It’s not quite as star-studded as Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, but their 1975 opus is by far their most personal. Since they were both fans of westerns as kids, this feels like Taupin telling a tale of them as musical superheroes half the time, as they make their way through setback after setback before becoming one of the biggest names in music. But despite their synergy together, John figured that a song as iconic as ‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight’ might not have been given the time of day now.
The music world might seem like the Wild West at times, but even John felt that working on a single that runs for about six minutes would have never worked in the modern age, saying, “We did have songs like ‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight’, which is one of the best songs that Bernie and I have ever written together. But whether a song like that could be a single these days, since it’s practically six minutes long, is questionable. It wasn’t about that anyway–it was about our experience, so it was like a mini-operetta in a way.”
It’s nice to know that they were convinced of the record’s power back in the day, but the idea of John playing the entire album in full as soon as it came out was probably not the best choice. Everyone was coming to hear him do a victory lap as one of the reigning kings of pop rock, but if he was going to play songs that 95% of the audience hasn’t even heard yet, he was bound to get more than a few long faces in the crowd.
But if he tried that same tactic nowadays, chances are fans would be lining up to see the legend play one of his masterpieces in full. Everything on the record might be a little bit longer than the average 2020s pop song, but for John, it’s never been about the commercial potential of everything. As far as he was concerned, a song had to move something in your heart before you start tapping your foot.
